Rick De Villiers

Fellow, SCAS
Iso Lomso Fellow, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study
Associate Professor, Department of English, University of the Free State

Rick de Villiers is an associate professor in the Department of English, University of the Free State. Alongside his SCAS fellowship, he currently holds an Iso Lomso Fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS). He is the author of Eliot and Beckett’s Low Modernism: Humility and Humiliation. (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), which was favourably reviewed and shortlisted for the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) book prize in 2023. He has written widely on modernism, contemporary fiction, and the intersection between literature and philosophy. At SCAS, he will be finalising his next monograph, On Second Thoughts: Literary Experiments in Recantation, which considers the motives and methods behind recantation in modernist and contemporary fiction.  His debut novel, Blot, was out in October 2026.

Rick de Villiers lives in Bloemfontein, South Africa, with his wife Michelle and their two children, Daniel and Emily. They have all accompanied him to Uppsala.

 

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2026-27.